[GOAL] Re: Comparing Revenues for OA and Subscription Publishing

[Stevan Harnad]

Comparing the average price per article of Gold OA today with the average
subscription publisher revenue per article today is uninformative and
misleading.

1. These are averages across many different forms of Gold OA: (i) subsidy-
or subscription-based Gold OA (no author fee), (ii) hybrid
subscription/Gold OA, (iii) Gold-only OA, (iv) junk Gold OA (no or next to
no peer review).

2. They are averages across all journal qualities.

3. They are averages calculated at a time when subscriptions are still in
the vast majority, and cannot be canceled until/unless their articles are
accessible in some other way.

4. Hence not only do the (arbitrary) asking prices for Gold vary widely,
but they vary widely in the quality and service they deliver.

5. Subscription journals vary too, but it is not at all clear (and indeed
very unlikely) that the Gold subset today matches their quality
distribution.

6. While un-cancellable subscriptions still prevail, Gold OA is just a
supplement, not a substitute, it entails double-payment by institutions
(subscriptions + Gold) and even double-dipping by publishers (for hybrid
Gold).

7. The missing factor in all of this is the potential of mandatory Green OA
to first provide OA at no extra cost, and once it reaches 100% globally, to
make journals *cancellable*, so they are forced to cut costs by downsizing
to peer-review alone.

8. Post-Green Gold OA will then be provided at a fair, sustainable price,
paid (and not double-paid) out of a fraction of the institutional
subscription cancellation savings.

None of this can be calculated on the basis of averaging the price per
article of Gold today -- but we can be sure that the post-Green cost will
be substantially lower than the average publisher revenue per article for
subscriptions today, pre-Green.

Stevan Harnad

On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 10:18 AM, David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>wrote:

> (Cross-posted)
>
> The Economist has published another piece on open access publishing:
>
>
> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21577035-open-access-scientific-publishing-gaining-ground-free-all
>
> I was struck by one paragraph in particular:
>
> Outsell, a Californian consultancy, estimates that open-access journals
> generated $172m in 2012. That was just 2.8% of the total revenue journals
> brought their publishers (some $6 billion a year), but it was up by 34%
> from 2011 and is expected to reach $336m in 2015. The number of open-access
> papers is forecast to grow from 194,000 (out of a total of 1.7m
> publications) to 352,000 in the same period.
>
>
>
> By my reckoning this means that in 2012 the revenue breakdown was :
>
> For Open Access = $890 per paper ($172m / 194k papers)
> For Sub Access = $3,500 per paper ($6 billion / 1.7m papers)
>
> If the 194,000 papers published in OA had been published in subscription
> journals the extra costs could have been around $500 million
> ((3500-890)x194000).  If you believe that all of these papers would
> probably have been published whatever the business model you could recast
> this as the worldwide community having made a saving of $500 million.
>
> If all 1.7m papers published in 2012 had been OA at $890 per paper the $6
> billion a year business would shrink to a $1.5 billion a year business.
>
> There are lots of assumptions here (not least that my maths are correct),
> but it is clear that
>
> a) the direct costs of publishing in OA journals are current significantly
> lower than publishing in subscriptions journals
>
> b) the average cost per paper in OA is significantly lower than the
> roughly £1,450 per article that represented the break-even point for the UK
> under which the UK would save money if we moved totally to OA
>
> c) the average is much, much lower than the typical price being offered
> for 'hybrid' OA.
>
> It would be very easy to construct an argument that the $890 per paper
> figure is not scaleable to all of journal publishing, but it is interesting
> that, at least for the moment, the figure is so low.
>
> David
>
>
>
>
>
>
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